As Adam Bandt sweats on the outcome of what's apparently been a disastrous re-election bid in the seat of Melbourne, there are some results in the booth-by-booth breakdown which point very strongly to the primary cause for his potential political demise.
In short, the Greens have been completely smashed in the vast majority of booths within the City of Yarra Local Government Area.
Correlation is not causality, but it is very hard not to interpret this as brand damage associated with the woeful performance of Australia's first and to date only Greens-majority local council from 2020-24.
THE YARRA FACTOR
The following is a summary of where the Greens have lost votes vs 2022 (correct at time of writing but subject to change).
When the booths are broken down into 4 categories - namely City of Yarra, City of Melbourne, the new booths from City of Stonnington acquired following the redistribution and the Prepoll booths, a clear picture emerges.
These new booths are represented by the "gained" area indicated below. It's clear to see how the new 2025 boundaries have made the seat more marginal, but remember that these changes are NOT applicable to any of the swings we are about to look at, which are like-for-like booth-for-booth.
The results are stark.
So the average swing against the Greens in the City of Yarra booths is NINE TIMES HIGHER than those in the City of Melbourne or the new Stonnington booths. It was mostly net business as usual in those places (although a fair bit of churn beneath the headline numbers - Carlton was up by 8% and East Melbourne down over 6%, go figure).
So it's very hard not to intepret those numbers as a resounding DISendorsement of the performance of the local Council.
Richmond/Cremorne was the epicentre of the backlash, excepting that one of the area's 5 booths - West Richmond recorded the highest swing TO the Greens in the entire electorate, so whatever went on at that booth bears more investigation.
Greens Postal votes were also down 12%
And you can add to that that the Greens clearly ran a very poor pre-poll game.
It's impossible to guage whether Yarra voters may be under or over-representated in the poor pre-poll and postal numbers, but they represent around 1 in 4 of the elctorate.
But the Greens lost more votes in total from the pre-poll Abbotsford booth than anywhere else in the electorate, with a 9.5% swing against them on primaries.
So if we include pre-poll, Bandt suffered a swing in 11/13 booths within the City of Yarra (85%). 5/7 (71%) in Stonnington, but on average mostly small drops, and in only 7/17 (41%) booths in City of Melbourne.
Whichever way you care to dice it, Yarra is the outlier.
One other point of note is that in spite of the overall performance in the City of Melbourne booths, the largest % swing against Bandt on primaries came in Docklands, which does tend to suggest that the wealthier end of their Boomer/retiree support has peeled away somewhat.
But it's difficult to make too many demographic assumptions about where the lost vote in Yarra has come from - as the catchment of the Richmond booths in question straddles a very disaparate mix of public housing tenants, renters and much wealthier homeowners.
WHERE TO FOR THE GREENS
In a contest which will now likely be decided by hundreds rather than thousands of votes, it seems safe to say that absent the evidenced brand damage in the City of Yarra, Adam Bandt would have already have delared victory by now in Melbourne, albeit on a reduced margin.
On the ground, you get the sense that they were caught napping, and had little idea that a result like this was on the cards. Which is suggestive of both a certain level of amateurism and a degree of hubris.
The Greens would be well advised to take a more active organisational interest in the performance of their elected Councillors, as it is very clear that any local-level brand damage can carry across to even a Federal level.
And you simply cannot afford to take pre-polling for granted, where it now represents over 4 in 10 voters.
The ALP should now be confident about their chances of returning the state seat of Richmond to the Labor fold in 2026, especially as they'll be up against the former Yarra Mayor who was in the seat for most of the chaos.
There has been some discussion already around whether the Greens should simply focus their resources on maintaining their position in the Senate, but that seems deeply misguided to me.
For one, very few people set out to specifically cast a Senate vote - not having a ground game at a local level, and not having local level campaigns isn't going to help your Senate vote overall.
Secondly, as I discussed yesterday, a future swing against the ALP (provided the party is positioned to capitalise on it) puts fully 5 lower house seats not just in play, but a highly realistic prospect.
But they need to counteract the brand damage they've taken - there needs to be a much greater sense of their being a party that negotiates with Labor to deliver results.
For a lot of potenial greens voters this time, I don't the issue was the ideology or their agenda, I think the sense was that they were counterproductively blocking positive change, and making far too much noise about themselves in the process.
Like the Liberals, Bandt still seems somewhat in denial about the scope of the challenge.
The added Mulsim votes have seen their overall primary hold up, but you have to question - if by some miracle peace came to the middle east in the next 4 years (and after the ALP has recognised a Palestinian state in this term), whether they are going to be capable of holding on to those votes.
We're already hearing lots of noise about Muslims who DIDN'T shift their vote because of concerns about the Greens' policies vis a vis faith based schools.
There are some tough choices facing the Greens in deciding who their base strategically ought to consist of, and what sorts of policies are required to pitch effectively to them.
Because all the idntity-based stuff is an absolute dead end for them - they've already captured that market and mostly what they've inherited from them is a wellspring of internal strife related to trans issues.
Becoming the "party of renters" was an absolutely brilliant pitch.
But they balls-ed it by aiming only at the stars, when more than emough people would have tuned in for a moon landing.
And I'm sorry, but we HAVE seen this movie before.
WHERE TO IN GENERAL?
Frankly, what I think the political landscape needs is something that takes the Left of the ALP that's crapped off over AUKUS and Gaza, melds it with the competent bits of the Greens, does away with the single issue party branding, and becomes a genuine democratic socialist party for the new milennium.
A thing with a political conscience that's actually capable of winning elections, that won't trip itself up in culture wars of its own making in the process.
Yes, alright. Back to my knitting ...
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